Description of Problem:
This is really two bugs in one report. ;-) The fonts.scale file in the abiword
fonts directory has blank lines at the end, which buggers mkfontdir. Once I
removed the blank lines it fixed the font problem, but even then abiword
segfaults on startup. :-(

This is because for some reason, xset +fp fails to work even if fonts.scale is fixed:
[root@spock fonts]# xset +fp /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts
X Error of failed request: 86
Major opcode of failed request: 51 (X_SetFontPath)
Serial number of failed request: 8
Current serial number in output stream: 10
Might be an X bug after all.

I d/l'ed the latest Abiword from abisource, and the included fonts.scale had the
same problem. Once I removed the blank lines, though, I did mkfontdir &
chkfontpath (add abisource fonts) and it started fine. Still crashed whenever I
closed a window tho. I'll check this out again on the next beta.

If the file contains blank lines, then it is a bad file. ttmkfdir should
be used to create fonts.scale.
xset +fp will never work in a default Red Hat Linux setup because we use
the xfs fotn server, and xset +fp talks to the X server - which is not
serving any fonts.
The proper way for this to be handled IMHO is for the Abiword package to
install its fonts, and run chkfontpath in it's post install script like all of
our other font packages do, which also then allows the fonts to be used by
other applications.